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'Zombie' Satellite Returns To Life
realperseus writes "The American telecommunications satellite Galaxy 15 has been brought under control after spending most of the year traversing the sky and wreaking havoc upon its neighbors. The satellite is currently at 98.5 degrees west longitude (from 133 west). An emergency patch was successfully uploaded, ensuring that the conditions which caused it to 'go rogue' will not occur again. Once diagnosis and testing have been completed, Intelsat plans to move the satellite back to 133 west."
aka 133t status
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Drat! Foiled again.
rewriting history since 2109
It wasn't a Zombie satellite. Zombies remain dead. Plus, it didn't incessantly transmit the message, "BRAINS! It's what's for dinner!"
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
If it was perturbed into a slightly lower orbit then it would orbit the Earth in less than 24hrs. If it ended up in a slightly higher orbit then it would orbit the Earth in slightly more than 24 hrs.
I don't want to commit to which way this satellite has gone (because I'm bound to get it backwards) but it's now about 2 hours displaced from where it should have been. That's an error in its orbit of about 0.02% or about 20 seconds per day.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
It's the only way to be sure.
"On Dec. 23, the battery on Galaxy 15 became completely drained, Intelsat officials said. Once that happened, the satellite..." ...began drifting above its own orbit. Then it went through a long dark tunnel and was met by other dead satellites. One of them, a dazzling, indistinguishable brillance, told Galaxy 15 its mission was not over, and it had to return. With a jolt, the satellite reset itself as designed and began accepting commands from Intelsat's control center.
It's worth comparing it with the venerable AO-7 satellite, which was launched in 1974 and eventually "died" when its battery failed dead short in 1981. A little over ten years later, the failed battery failed again, this time going *open* circuit and allowing the satellite to run entirely off its solar panels. So, while the satellite is illuminated by the Sun it works fairly reliably. You need to keep the power down, because it has a linear transponder so the more power you put in the more comes out - until you exceed the tiny amount produced by the solar cells. It works, though, and people communicate across the world on it every day.
Well, um...well...
Yeah. That's it.
I could imply that she's gay, too. Lolerz.
Seriously, three short lines which clearly convey the entire summary of the story, contains lots of links to both story and background, AND doesn't contain terrible typos! Also, geeky and interesting. This is what slashdot needs more of.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
So does Intelsat have to give the insurance money back now? Or does it take more than a year to process this kind of claim anyway?
They were delayed due to problems scheduling an appointment for an adjustment agent to take a look at the satellite.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
What impresses me most is that you can just upload patches to orbiting satellites. Sounds like a party for the next DEFCON...
"We have placed Galaxy 15 in safe mode, and at this time, we are pleased to report it no longer poses any threat of satellite interference to either neighboring satellites or customer services," Intelsat officials announced." Unknown to anyone, the last shuttle launch had a secret space walk in order to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL on the sat's terminal.
So does Intelsat have to give the insurance money back now?
I'm interested in the preventative actions prescribed by the insurance policy to avoid further software catastrophes.
Kudos to whomever figured out the patch, though, and those who designed the system such that the patch was still able to be uploaded in its current condition.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
...Galaxy XV battery completely drained and the satellite's baseband equipment command unit reset...
No mixup. This is basic vampire functionality -- drain the victim; and when the victim resets the victim is now a vampire. So, the satellite has transformed from zombie to vampire. Which satellite will it drain next? (Echelon is my first choice)
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Except for two stable points at 75 and 255 degrees east longitude, any geostationary satellite suffers an East-West (or West-East) perturbation due to the earth not being a perfect sphere. This is called "triaxiality" by experts in the field.
The result is that without correcting maneuvers the satellite longitudinal position oscillates around those two stable points, even if the orbit is exactly at the geostationary altitude.
An emergency patch was successfully uploaded, ensuring that the conditions which caused it to 'go rogue' will not occur again.
Sounds exactly like the marketing-speak I use when people find bugs in my code... Sounds better than "we screwed up"
"Kudos to whomever figured out the patch, though, and those who designed the system such that the patch was still able to be uploaded in its current condition."
It was actually a coincidence that they were able to do it in the first place. According to TFA it wasn't some clever people down here that fixed it.
"On Dec. 23, the battery on Galaxy 15 — which relied on solar panels pointed at the sun to generate power — became completely drained, Intelsat officials said. Once that happened, the satellite reset itself as designed and began accepting commands from Intelsat's control center."
The satellite basically fixed itself. The uploaded patch didn't fix the problem, but will prevent it from occurring in the future. Although you can bet that future satellites will most definitely have some kind of watchdog to kill the payload in the event that the position control systems experience a critical failure.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Corollary one: Any object in orbit around a body with mass has an external force applied to it.
Corollary two: Any object in the solar system is part of an n-body problem and has lots of external forces applied to it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
From what I understand they were on it all the time but there was simply nothing they could do. The satellite's systems did not respond to commands so they basically had to wait for it to drain its batteries and have the emergency system kick in and reset it autonomously. That just happened, so now they can actually work on it again.
I am sure that bonus is going to be REAL NICE for saving $250,000,000 in hardware from deorbit.
I was curious just how far off that is. Turns out, it's quite a bit.
The uploaded patch didn't fix the problem, but will prevent it from occurring in the future.
Reading the article I am not sure how. My reading is that it has working data in something like RAM and a reference copy is built into ROM. If power is reset it copies from ROM to RAM. Radiation can corrupt the RAM. So how can a software change make the RAM less likely to be corrupted? Or have they tweaked a mechanism which triggers a reset to the copy in ROM?
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